Is it possible to improve how Microsoft word handles text input from Keyman Keyboards?

[katelem]

MS Word treats each letter input as … (see attached image):
The one in green box was typed using English keyboard that comes with Windows while the one in the red box was typed with Keyman keyboard.

Can this be improved?

This topic is based on the comment I made here:

How to improve West Africa keyboards - French accents and spell check in MS Word

I agree with you; it is counter intuitive to type the diacritic before the base letter. That is just like dotting the “i” before writing the body of the “i”. I have also noticed a similar problem relating to spell-checking in Keyman: When I type in the local language, each keystroke is taken to mean a word, so that if you decide to undo typing a word, you can’t; you can only undo typing a letter. It makes the undo/redo function in MS Word to be less useful.

and Marc’s reply here:

How to improve West Africa keyboards - French accents and spell check in MS Word

There are a number of things going on here. With Keyman, you can setup the typing order to be whichever works better for your users. If your users prefer to type diacritics afterwards, they can do so, and you can use a post-processing group as @Lorna suggested to normalize any combining marks into a composed form. It’s a little more complex than an NFD keyboard, but it’s worth the effort. We can help you with this if you need. (Note, you also need to make sure your rule contexts cater to both …

Spec:
Platform: Windows 10
Keyman Version: 18.0.193
Keyboard: Obolo Chwerty
App used: Microsoft Word 2019

[Marc]

Yes, I agree it’s not ideal but I don’t know of any way to improve this with Word at present.

[Alex_Larkin]

Keyman has a fairly large user base. Enough to get the attention of large corporations (example here). If I were to want to investigate this issue further, I would install some of the most popular keyboards on Keyman and see if I can reproduce the issue. Then I would make a bug report with Microsoft. Worth a shot!

[Lorna]

I suggest that whatever keyboard you choose should make sure it doesn’t use any of the shortcut keys that Microsoft Word uses (CTRL+C), (ALT+A), etc, etc. Otherwise they might get derailed by that issue.